Photography is Silly and Stupid, and I Think That’s Amazing.

Photography Manifesto By DJ Jelinek

Reflecting on my experience with photography and its interaction with music scenes.

I enjoy amateur looking photography more than I enjoy pristine Instagram worthy shots. ‘Amatuer’ photography blurs the line between a photographer and a hobbyist. It gives off the sense that photos are readily accessible and achievable – because they are. I’m not stating that photography is skilless, it's just oversaturated. Photography is more accessible than it used to be. Photography used to be a closed and complicated process. But now, just about everyone (such as myself) has a camera in their pocket ready to take an instant photo that could rival most general tools.

My journey photographing the Illinois music scene started in the beginning of 2022. I needed a reason to put myself in that space, and photography felt like a necessity for the environment. I used photography as a guise to situate myself in this creative environment. I had to find a way to justify myself being there; I was allowing myself access to the space on the condition that I was ‘working.’ I felt a lack of community in my life and wanted to find something that would give me the space to air out my ideas. Steadily, I grew to understand the importance of the photographer to their environment.

Photography in its raw form is documentative. That’s not everyone’s definition, but that’s what it means to me. It’s a media of work that proves that what was there was actually there.

This leads photography to be the perfect pairing with ephemeral artistic events. Music is one of those short lived things. It’s a medium of work that has always lacked the quality of being visualized. Of course, you can translate sound into visual waves, but the language is generally incomprehensible without audio technology. Music requires a visual to achieve a higher level of impact. This allows image making such as illustration and photography to marry itself to the media.

I started working with more expensive equipment like the standard Canon Rebel T7. It feels more creative compared to smartphones (even though the average consumer doesn’t care). Although this expensive equipment did a great job, it felt alienating. Sure my work went appreciated, but there was no way I could join the crowd. I’d risk smashing my good gear, and you can’t just leave your DSLR hanging on a bar stool for someone to take. My goal of community was unfulfilled, I was just viewed as a worker. So, I swapped my DSLR for a pocket Y2K digital point & shoot. I wanted to join the crowd.

With this, I wasn’t a bystander with a lens anymore, now I’m a party-goer just as much as everyone else. That changed the way I photographed my surroundings. I cared less about who was front and center on stage, and more about personal crowd interactions. I enjoyed the most notable party figures in the mosh pit: the crazy kids stomping around the floor releasing all their energy for their favorite band – this was the musician's creation. The crowd is a byproduct of the music, and therefore the crowd is the artistic expression of the musician’s work. It’s all just one big collaborative, performative work. Which begs the question:

Who the fuck is the artist here? It’s probably everyone.

Photography manipulates the area it captures. As the artist you can choose to highlight and exclude specific events, characters, and places. If I don’t like a character because of their problematic behavior (what the hell is wrong with some of y'all), then I can simply omit them from my craft.

It’s a little scary holding the power of documentation. If I'm the only photographer on the scene, then everyone stands at the mercy of my lens. I can erase people from my personal history book (aka my SD card) simply by refusing to point a camera at them.

It’s not like their creative endeavors went unnoticed; after all, a band draws attendees. People showed up to interact with the art, and that work lives on as a memory. Never mind audio recordings on Spotify, that’s only 1/4th of the actual artwork. The other elements include writing, performance, and visuals. Visual is what photography is concerned with. What happens when the next generation of artists come to remember the past they were never around to experience? When an event happens, the only mark it left was the lasting memory of the audience. With a camera, that memory could not only be visualized digitally, but also materialized via print. It’s archived.

TLDR; if a tree falls in a forest… you get the rest.

There’s always something new happening in Illinois despite the repetitive subject of long-haired men with parental issues. My favorite aspect is the sense of chance and randomness. I don’t exercise control over the crowd. If I point my camera at someone, their reaction is variable. Maybe they’ll smile and wave, or they’ll stick their tongue out. Occasionally they’ll cover their face and flip me off. Sometimes, the crowd doesn’t even do anything. They’ll sit on the floor and just listen. Often, they simply ignore. That can be just as interesting as a bruise-inducing mosh pit.

Every action attendees perform is art to me. Their expression is a reaction to the music they're listening to.

Photography like this doesn’t require a warm up stretch, you just happen to be there in the right place at the right time with proportional equipment for the circumstance. Whether that’s purposeful or not is up to you. Traditional wedding photography deserves a pristine DSLR, and house venues deserve my used crappy Y2K point & shoots. The art makes itself, you’re just there to kidnap it and hold it hostage in your SD card. I think that’s fucking stupid, and that’s what’s amazing about it.

All I do is press buttons and experience events.

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